Bootstrapping a developer portal | Adam Rogal (DoorDash)
Feb 27, 2024
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Explore the journey of DoorDash's developer portal with Adam Rogal, from initial vision to driving adoption. Learn about funding, name selection, and valuable advice for beginners. Discover strategies for getting feedback, driving awareness, and what could have been done differently. Dive into practical leadership tips and the importance of developer tools for enhancing productivity.
Establish a developer portal foundation by focusing on addressing critical engineer problems.
Encourage contributions and open-source mindset to foster developer portal growth and sustainability.
Leverage platform as real-time company reflection and implement AI support for ongoing funding and advancement.
Deep dives
Creating a Vision for the Developer Portal
Starting at DoorDash set the foundation for envisioning a developer portal from day one. Adam Rogel, leading Developer Productivity, identified the need for organization within tooling and ownership structures. Drawing inspiration from Uber's and Stripe's experiences, they envisioned a platform for engineers' contributions.
Bootstrapping the Developer Portal
Amidst initial challenges in identifying needs, the team focused on addressing critical engineer problems: ownership and tool accessibility, sparking the idea of a developer portal. The journey began by participating in a hackathon that led to the first version of the Dev Console, showcasing tools for testing Dasher and consumer interactions, and quality metric dashboards.
Navigating a Different Development Approach
Diverging from conventional service catalog development, the team took an innovative route to demonstrate immediate value. By prioritizing tools addressing engineers' immediate needs over the platform's expansion, they won the hackathon and kickstarted the development of the Dev Console.
Building a Collaborative Community and Continual Iteration
Encouraging contributions across teams and fostering an open-source mindset within the company shaped the Dev Console's growth. Prioritizing sustainability, the focus shifted towards balancing feature development with technical debt repayment and evolving to introduce self-serve capabilities and AI support integration.
Sustaining and Scaling the Developer Portal
In securing ongoing funding and advancing sustainability, leveraging the platform as a real-time reflection of the company's landscape and implementing AI-driven support channels within the Dev Console emerged as key strategies. Reflecting on the journey, lessons learned included effectively managing technical debt, diversifying development approaches, and fostering a collaborative community for continual innovation.
In this episode we’re joined by Adam Rogal, who leads Developer Productivity and Platform at DoorDash. Adam describes DoorDash’s journey with their internal developer portal, and gives advice for other teams looking to follow a similar path. Adam also describes how his team delivered value quickly and drove adoption for their developer platform.
Discussion points:
(1:47) Why DoorDash explored implementing a developer portal
(6:59) The initial vision for the developer portal